WordPress's Matt Mullenweg at WordcampSF

WordPress is now one of the highest skills in demand! Large portions of the web are being built on a system that is completely open source

WordPress was born on a blog- a b2 blog
Early versions focused on ease of installation
B2 was his first experience with blogging software, and it had the GPL, which enabled him to modify the software when the lead developer went away
Wordpress was a fork from B2
1.2 had plug-ins
Themes came in 1.5
Plug-ins and themes were the most important decisions in WP history
It allowed WP to become a platform and allows others to be part of the community without mutiliating the core software, which stays clean

Stats:
10m downloads
5.5m .org blogs
58m new posts
22b page views
55% of pageviews are on .com
Predictions:
1943-Thomas Watson said there would be about 5 computers in the world
Matt probably wearing 5 computers on his body this year
1943: Bill Gates said Spam will be solved in 2008
Last year, Matt predicted Crazyhorse

Crazyhorse: Matt thought it would be super-important in 2008, but he didn’t know it was the name of a strip club in SF  The Crazyhorse project produced the interface closet to the one we use today, and the goal of it was to make WP faster and make it invisible. Quickpress came in with Crazyhorse, and so did threaded comments, the plug-in browser, and Intense debate. Also one-click upgrades

Matt also said this year would be the year of themes, and WP introduced its theme directory
Themes are free at the core, but now some themes are premium
GPL gives you freedom to charge for the theme, but then you are also free to redistribute it
(I use a premium theme)
Matt’s introducing a page for premium theme developers
The famous themes inspire innovation, and themse are built on themes
(Shows 4 incredly different themes all built on Thematic)
On the Internet, no one has to know you are using WordPress

Using the GPL in business: Introduces Alex King, who owns a company called Crowd Favorite in Denver, which exists entirely by designing and developing on WordPress. He has also produced a framework called Carrington, which allows people to build themes on it

And he has started an on-call WP Help Center wphelpcenter.com 512.788.9236 for small questions and customization

P2: It’s like Twitter.
But it moves the conversation to the home pages, threaded and in line
It’s a real time, asynchronous chat, but it’s in a blog
That is going on the home page of every blog

Buddypress: Developed by Andy Peatling.  Facebook in a blog. A social network built on open source. This will get bigger next year.
Can be skinned and branded for everyone’s site.
421 days of love to build it to 1.0
Will this be the way people socialize their WordPress sites?
Buddypress has the momentum WP had in the early days

Plugins:
Wordtwit
Yet another Related Posts
WPtouch – makes wordpress mobile from iPhone

Viddler – brings in video to WP
Comment Moderator
Licensing for Picapp
Polldaddy
Videopress – customized player on your home page. Now available on WordPress.com, but coming to .org

2.8 is coming.

2.7 tired everyone out. And it was almost bug free. But in 2.8 the infrastructure will be better. Theme previews, 800 themes, better sidgets, multiple galleries, and a new widgets API

And big thing are planned for 3.0 already.

42% of downloads this year were international. So now videos are being captioned in various languages by .dotSub

The big challenge for internation is plug-in localization. Frameworks for different languages. Huge open sources communities in places like Indonesia and Brazil are beginning to make big contributions.

ichat with WordPress: log into im.wordpress.com on Jabber

Big news: WPMU and Worpress.org are merging their code! WordPress.org is going to evolve a community.

More big news: Canonical plug-ins are coming.
Random stuff:
Matt: “Friends don’t let friends use the wrong W”
See www.Edmorita.com for a guy who got  a real tattoo of the WordPress logo.  It’s gorgeous!